How Vibes Helps Redbox Stay at the Forefront with Its Mobile Marketing

It might surprise you to hear that video rental company Redbox has been leveraging mobile wallet since 2013. Even though mobile wallet was in its infancy within a mobile marketing strategy back then, the brand was and continues to be quick to experiment and embrace new mobile technologies to better engage its customers.

Vibes is proud to partner with Redbox, helping the brand develop innovation that drives results.

The Secret to Redbox’s Mobile Success

Besides having Vibes as a partner, Redbox has a few strategies in place that have contributed to its growing SMS subscriber base of 8 million customers. The first is focusing on delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time. Segmentation is of the utmost importance to Redbox, especially when it comes to customer rental behaviors:

What types of games/videos do they rent?

What day do they most frequently rent on?

Which locations do they rent from?

With this valuable data (all of which is carefully parsed in its sophisticated CRM system), Redbox can deliver highly customized text and email campaigns that drive conversion and offer redemption.

The brand also isn’t afraid to experiment, even if it means occasionally failing. Because so much of mobile marketing isn’t necessarily tried and true as of yet, finding success often means taking risks, and Redbox has taken many.

Take mobile wallet, for example. Redbox has done an excellent job of anticipating customer demand, and, when it realized as far back as 2013 that wallets were the future in mobile marketing, the brand began experimenting in small batches. It started by promoting mobile wallet features to its email subscribers, 50% of whom were accessing their email from a mobile device.

The risk was a calculated one, but it definitely paid off: the mobile wallet campaign has seen 85k wallet saves (a 34% wallet save rate), and a 14% redemption rate.

Now mobile wallet has been integrated into Redbox’s larger mobile strategy, and mobile wallet adoption is on the rise, with 106k new subscribers.

Redbox also pays attention to customer behavior. While it does have a presence on Apple Pay, by and large, its audience skews toward Android Pay, and so the brand has put more focus on developing loyalty rewards through this mobile wallet platform.

And finally, Redbox realizes that you can’t make 100% of mobile users happy (or customers, for that matter). The brand focuses on its core audience, those who use mobile to redeem offers and promotions, and delivers highly-effective communications in order to keep them engaged.

Days of Deals Campaign

Once specific campaign that Vibes helped Redbox with was for its holiday-themed Days of Deals mobile game. Each day, participants could text to get a discount on a movie or game rental. Over time, the game evolved to feature an advent calendar of deals, and with the swipe of a finger, players could unveil prizes and enter to win them.

Last year’s campaign saw a 19% redemption rate increase over 2015, and a 17% stronger redemption rate than previous programs.

What’s Next for Redbox?

Redbox will continue to focus on highly-targeted loyalty offers via mobile wallet and SMS, and would love to incorporate more location-based push notifications to capture customers who are at or near a Redbox location, as well as send notifications to customers when an item on their wishlist is available (with attached offer).

Vibes continues to provide Redbox with cutting-edge technologies and strategies, like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger integration to help the keep brand in line with its objective to stay at the forefront of mobile.

A brand with over 32 million app downloads is clearly doing something right, and Vibes is honored to be a part of Redbox’s continued success in mobile marketing.

Previous Article

How to Get Internal Buy-in for Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Even if you and your marketing department staff know the value of a certain mobile marketing strategy, your...

Next Article

Must-Have Push Notification Strategies for Your Mobile Marketing

The fact that 56% of consumers allow push notifications may cause you to assume that reaching them through ...